The Cunning Little Vixen receives a sensual but rather patchy outdoor makeover

Opera Holland Park has an advantage when it comes to The Cunning Little Vixen. This isn’t Glyndebourne or Garsington, where nature waits politely outside for the interval. Here it invades the tent-auditorium: pigeons flutter across the stage; peacock-calls rival the singers; the occasional bee weaves lazily through the audience. Where better to stage Janá?ek’s peat-rich opera, wriggling with animal life and all its natural urges, instincts and cycles?

Vixen may have started life as a newspaper comic-strip, but there’s nothing two-dimensional about the opera it inspired – a comedy with a bloody gash through the middle of it. A young vixen is caught by a Forester and taken home as a family pet. But captivity only sharpens her claws and her need for freedom, and she escapes to live a life as intense as it is brief. This forest is less Disney than properly dangerous, a place of threat as well as beauty and abundance

Any production must balance the work’s anarchic energy, and the eventual death of its heroine, with its rapturous score and an anthropomorphised set of animals whose quirks can quickly turn cosy. Stephen Barlow’s new staging doesn’t entirely avoid cute (indeed it actively courts it, at times), but it retains just enough bite to keep the work from caramelising into sentimentality.

Barlow turns his stage-mirror on his immediate environment. Gone are Janá?ek’s Moravian forests, and in their place we have Holland Park itself, home to a riotous pack of urban foxes who get their breakfast at Pret and squabble (in a topical English translation by Norman Tucker) with the bookish Badger over the recycling-bin den. Sets are minimal; the fa?ade of Holland House supplies the backdrop, with all focus instead on designer Andrew D Edwards’s colourful costumes and headdresses – whimsical urges tempered with modern streetwear.

Add in an excellent children’s chorus, who run through the audience wielding long silk streamers like jellyfish and take many of the smaller animal roles, and you have something between carnival and community-show. Janá?ek’s restless sequence of unnumbered scenes isn’t smoothed by a lot of prop-shifting and resetting, nor does the orchestra yet fully find its flow – conductor Jessica Cottis meeting some resistance to her incisive account from a reduced City of London Sinfonia.

But Jennifer France’s Vixen fizzes with life. Voice bright and sweet, delivery bold and larky, flinging Janá?ek’s jagged conversational fragments around before swelling briefly into the sensuality of the love-music – or sex-music, let’s be honest – with Julia Sporsen’s Fox, she’s irresistible. Sporsen’s sterner, darker soprano floods the auditorium with sound, a rare singer riding the orchestral swell rather than disappearing beneath it.

Ashley Riches is a luxurious jump-in as the Poacher who kills the Vixen, and Charne Rochford’s strongly sung Schoolmaster brings some depth to the local human world, which can seem black-and-white against the colours of the animals. Grant Doyle’s Forester is weathered and pleasantly worn – lots of experience behind his eyes, and plenty of character in his craggy tone. His closing hymn to nature (exuberantly lit by Rory Beaton, going full circus-spectacular) is an invitation to life after a year of suspended animation. The seasons change, death passes, the world continues: as an anthem for a post-Covid world, we could do a lot worse.

Until July 30. Tickets: 0300 999 1000; operahollandpark.com